{"id":145898,"date":"2020-07-02T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2020-07-02T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=145898"},"modified":"2020-07-02T09:40:26","modified_gmt":"2020-07-02T13:40:26","slug":"philip-roths-last-laugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/02\/philip-roths-last-laugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Roth\u2019s Last Laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Philip Roth. Photo courtesy of Philip Roth.<\/p><\/div>\n

April 24, 2018: \u201cBrace yourself, Ben,\u201d Philip calls to say. \u201cOur beloved Meatball has been downgraded by the Health Department from A to B. This will ruin them! People see that sickly green B in the window and stay away.\u201d I report having seen something still more shocking at the Pan-Asian hellhole two blocks up. \u201cI know, I know!\u201d says Philip. \u201cThey\u2019re sporting a ptomainish, orange-colored C. A rat in a tuxedo greets you at the door.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s on to the next thing and hangs up without goodbye. It is gratifying to hear him so exuberant. But five days later he phones to say he is \u201cpoorly\u201d\u2014one of his old-fashioned turns of phrase. I say I\u2019ll stay with him that night at his apartment. Around two in the morning I hear him cry out from his room. He\u2019s in trouble. I dial 911. Paramedics arrive with exemplary speed but have trouble defibrillating Philip. I can tell by the way they are talking that he could die. After an infinitely long minute or two his heartbeat reverts. We transport him first to Lenox Hill Hospital, then later that day to NewYork\u2013Presbyterian, which he will never leave. <\/p>\n

My routine for the next twenty-two mornings is to walk from my apartment to Columbus Circle and take the A train uptown to NewYork\u2013Presbyterian. \u201cWhat news on the Rialto?\u201d he tends to say when I come through the door of his room. Anything can become an adventure, even a ride on the A train. One morning, a strapping young panhandler enters the sparsely populated car I\u2019m in and says: \u201cLadies and gents! Ladies and gents! I am attempting to raise some funds<\/em>, if any of you prima donnas care to help.\u201d<\/p>\n

I report this and Philip throws back his head. \u201cOh, Saul would have loved that! He\u2019d have used it!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrankly, I didn\u2019t see any prima donnas on that train.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless he meant you, Ben.\u201d It was to be our last laugh together.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cLigt in drerd<\/em>,\u201d he used to say of anyone dead. \u201cLies in the ground.\u201d He admired this blunt bit of Yiddish. \u201cPity our erstwhile mother tongue, spoken by Ashkenazim going back to the time of Chaucer and now reduced in America to stock phrases. A European language that produced a great literature, now consigned to Borscht Belt gags.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like him, I can\u2019t help imagining loved ones lying in the earth, as Yiddish would have it\u2014the slow processes going on down there, down where there\u2019s nothing but what\u2019s called in Sabbath\u2019s Theater<\/em> \u201cthe inescapable rectitude, not to mention the boredom, of death,\u201d where you\u2019re deprived of \u201cthe fun of existing that even a flea must feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saul Bellow was certain he would see his parents again after death. Philip Roth was as certain he would not. This is one way of assessing the difference between them. Who does not grasp the fierce impulse to believe? Consideration of all the ages before you existed provokes no shudder. Consideration of all the ages when you will no longer exist is simply unacceptable. How can this immense datum I am be extinguished? How can Mama and Papa be altogether gone\u2014simply gone? How can it be that we won\u2019t be together again? How can that be? When Prince Andrei dies in War and Peace<\/em> Natasha turns to Princess Maria and says, speaking for all of us: \u201cWhere has he gone? Where is he now?\u201d Philip\u2019s solution was to rename mortality immortality and declare himself indestructible till death. It\u2019s not a bad gloss on what\u2019s always been the ultimate human problem.<\/p>\n

Strolling past the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle one spring day a few years back, we take note of the New York City Atheists, who\u2019ve set up shop under a drooping tent with isinglass windows. Within are the washed-out unbelievers purveying their pamphlets and hoping to engage you in philosophical conversation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy must the atheists\u2019 booth look so sad?\u201d Philip asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cSaint Patrick\u2019s it ain\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big money is behind the fairy tales. All those centuries of fairy tales.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWish away the fairy tales and you wish away all the art, music, and poetry they\u2019ve engendered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whenever we\u2019re walking and Philip has a thought, he\u2019ll stop in his tracks. \u201cReligions are the refuge of the weak-minded. I\u2019d dispense with all the art, music, and even poetry they\u2019ve engendered if we could finally be free of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe B-minor Mass? The Sistine ceiling? George Herbert\u2019s poems?\u201d<\/p>\n

A dog walker comes past with eight or ten doggies of all sizes and shapes. \u201cYou see that?\u201d he says. \u201cPerfect concord among the breeds. The border collies admire the Heinz fifty-sevens. The Newfoundlands would make love to the dachshunds if they could. And why? Because dogs are wise enough to have no religion<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a certain amount of God talk at our house. \u2018God knows whether you\u2019re lying\u2019 and that sort of thing. Was there no talk about him in your family?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNone, fortunately. Our Zion was the United States. Our divinity was Franklin Roosevelt. My mother lit Friday-night candles, true, but only out of piety for her own mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the Romantics got it right,\u201d I say. \u201cThey announced that God and the Imagination are one. If I had to declare a religion when passing through customs, that formula would be it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another mood, Philip exempted \u201cthe great reality-reflecting religion\u201d of the ancient Greeks from his censure. He writes in The Human Stain<\/em>: \u201cNot the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine<\/em> stain.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the Greek gods still existed, imagine the concessions they\u2019d set up at Columbus Circle. Atheism would have to fold its tent and slink away.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In I Married a Communist<\/em>, Murray Ringold offers a taxonomy of American Jews. Reading it you cannot help spotting your relations: \u201cthere are the affable Jews\u2014the inappropriate-laughing Jews, the I-love-everyone-deeply Jews, the I-was-never-so-moved Jews, the Momma-and-Poppa-were-saints Jews, the I-do-it-all-for-my-gifted-children Jews, the I\u2019m-sitting-here-listening-to-Itzhak-Perlman-and-I\u2019m-crying Jews,\u201d and so on. With lightning speed they\u2019d shed the ways of the shtetl and made themselves pillars of Americanism. They knew the brightness of their prospects here corresponded to the worst event in thirty centuries of Jewish history, that they were flourishing even as their European counterparts vanished into the abyss.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this country has given the Jews\u2014\u201d I say one evening, and Philip cuts me off.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s what the Jews have given this country. In the sciences, the arts, in medicine, in philanthropy. And do you know why? Because night after night, year after year, decade after decade, we\u2019ve gone to bed sober. It\u2019s as simple as that. How could we have avoided the resentment of our hard-drinking Gentile brethren? Did I ever tell you about my dealings with that dipso Capote?\u201d<\/p>\n

He had indeed and has performed the playlet for me. In act one, he is at home watching Johnny Carson when Truman comes on and explains that culture in America is under the thumb of \u201ca Jewish mafia that runs from Columbia University to Columbia Pictures.\u201d In act two, Philip, seeing Capote at George Plimpton\u2019s a few weeks later, corners him and says: \u201cI saw you on The Tonight Show<\/em> and take the gravest exception to what you said.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing I can do about that!\u201d says Truman and flits away.<\/p>\n

Curtain.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a dope<\/em> I was to let him get off a line like that and vanish into his golden cloud. And me left to my umbrage. No, the author of In Cold Blood<\/em> had no use for earnest, striving, Jewishy Philip Roth. My name was not in the New York Social Register and I didn\u2019t know how to drink or even smoke a cigarette.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plimpton had been among Philip\u2019s first Gentile friends. \u201cI thought they\u2019d all be like that,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cHis sleekness and lightly held entitlement and insouciance<\/em> were a revelation. His books of \u2018participatory journalism\u2019 pioneered something\u2014a self-deflating style of autobiography born of supreme self-assurance.\u201d<\/p>\n

After reading in manuscript Exit Ghost<\/em>, the final novel narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, with its eight-page excursus on George, I showed Philip an extraordinary photo I\u2019d found. In it Plimpton is seated at Elaine\u2019s, the now-defunct Manhattan restaurant famed for superior clientele and ghastly food. Revelers surround George. It looks as though the fun will never stop. Everything Zuckerman had fled from when he retreated to the Berkshires is summed up in the glamour of that image. \u201cHere is the cover of your book,\u201d I said. \u201cThis photo is full of the enticements that Nathan, that ghost of a man, gave up for art.\u201d But the photographer foolishly drove a hard bargain and Philip decided against the image. I still wish he\u2019d shelled out the extortionate fee. That would have been some book jacket.<\/p>\n

Zuckerman, who narrates nine of Philip\u2019s books, is overwhelmingly an embodiment of iron discipline and self-denying artistic aspiration. The young acolyte we meet in The Ghost Writer<\/em> metamorphoses into the scandalously successful author in Zuckerman Unbound<\/em> and The Anatomy Lesson<\/em> and The Prague Orgy<\/em>. When we meet him next, in The Counterlife<\/em>, he\u2019s married for a fourth time, to Maria Freshfield, and expecting a child. Wives one, two, and three Zuckerman had dispatched with an airy phrase in The Anatomy Lesson<\/em>: \u201cthe puzzle of passionless marriages to three exemplary women.\u201d In The Facts<\/em>, published after The Counterlife<\/em>, Maria is still expecting. Seems like quite a long pregnancy. What it really seems is that Philip had no particular interest in Nathan\u2019s amatory or conjugal life\u2014to say nothing of his parental prospects. (Easier to imagine Garbo with a baby than Nathan Zuckerman.) He stands for artistic struggle, not love or marriage or parenthood, and the realist who made him quite casually dropped the ball when called upon to give his hero-narrator a convincing marital history.<\/p>\n

In Exit Ghost<\/em>, our hero, having earlier told us of Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk, now returns, Rip Van Winkle\u2013like, from his long years alone to a vastly changed New York. The year is 2004. Zuckerman is so cut off as to have barely heard of 9\/11. Everything puzzles him. Having consecrated himself completely, year in and year out, to the turning of raw life into words on the page, he is a revenant among flesh-and-blood people\u2014but a revenant longing for one last outburst of feeling, one last bit of unwritten, untransformed, \u201creal\u201d life. Nothing doing. Experience is over for him, long since. He\u2019s been impotent and incontinent for years, a man removed, as Philip puts it in an interview, \u201cfrom all turbulence, from all his deeds and misdeeds and the distraction of the pursuit of happiness\u2014the depicter, rather, of other lives, whose personal trials and historic travails come to possess his imagination entirely and feed on the strength of his mental energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

After several days he flees New York as rashly as he arrived. Thus Philip says goodbye to Nathan Zuckerman, his intricate invention. \u201cGone for good\u201d are the final words of the book.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Passing by Columbus Circle on May 20, 2018, the day it became apparent that Philip would not recover\u2014a lovely spring day, a gift of a day, a day lacking nothing\u2014I looked in vain for our atheists. Gone for good? Their place had been taken by the Lyndon LaRouchians with pictures of their current hero, Donald Trump. (Three years earlier they were displaying images of Obama with a Hitler mustache.) I am a man slow to anger who, once there, may turn violent. Anyhow, here is what happened next: I ripped down one of the pictures. \u201cMister, please<\/em>!\u201d cried a LaRouchian. I pushed their \u201cliterature,\u201d you should pardon the expression, off the table and into the gutter, where it belonged. \u201cCall the cops!\u201d another LaRouchian implored passersby. They just laughed. But I was not laughing. I was in a fucking rage. And grieving. And spotless as the lamb.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read Philip Roth<\/a>\u2019s Art of Fiction interview<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Benjamin Taylor\u2019s memoir <\/em>The Hue and Cry at Our House won the 2017 Los Angeles Times\/Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography and was named a <\/em>New York Times Editors\u2019 Choice; his <\/em>Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2015 by Thomas Mallon in the <\/em>New York Times Book Review and by Robert McCrum in the <\/em>Observer; and his <\/em>Naples Declared: A Walk around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in <\/em>The New Yorker. He is also the author of two novels, <\/em>Tales out of School and <\/em>The Book of Getting Even, as well as a book-length essay, <\/em>Into the Open.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth<\/a>, by Benjamin Taylor, published in May by Penguin, an imprint of the Penguin Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC Copyright (c) 2020 by Benjamin Taylor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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